Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Bosco

The cathedral of Cuneo, dedicated to Santa Maria del Bosco and San Michele, is the city's principal church and the seat of the diocese of Cuneo-Fossano. Its story runs from a woodland chapel served by Benedictine monks to a grand baroque rebuilding, a neoclassical facade and a frescoed dome, beside the porticoes of Piazza Galimberti.

Why it matters

This is the church where Cuneo's religious and civic history converges. A chapel of Santa Maria stood here before the town itself was founded, in a dense wood that gave the building its title, and the site was a Benedictine priory under the abbey of Borgo San Dalmazzo before becoming a parish by the thirteenth century. When Cuneo finally received its own bishop in 1817, this church became the cathedral. Declared a national monument in 1940, it preserves an important altarpiece by Andrea Pozzo, dome frescoes by Giuseppe Toselli and a crypt where the bishops of Cuneo are buried. It is a central landmark in Cuneo's religious and artistic history.

What to notice

• Andrea Pozzo's altarpiece of the Madonna and Child with Saint Michael and

Saint John the Baptist, painted for the high altar between 1684 and 1685 by the celebrated Jesuit artist and theorist.

• The dome, raised to designs prepared by Stefano Rovere in 1832 and completed

in 1835, frescoed in 1834 by Giuseppe Toselli of Peveragno with the Assumption surrounded by Cuneo's patrons: Saint Michael, Saint John the Baptist and the Blessed Angelo Carletti.

• The neoclassical facade built between 1863 and 1866 by Cuneo architect Antonio

Bono, with four fluted Corinthian columns carrying a tympanum; because the old facade was out of line with the street, Bono overlaid the new one, turned to face the square.

• The chapel of Sant'Anna, decorated around 1670 at the expense of the weavers'

guild with stuccoes and paintings of the life of Saint Agatha by Lelio Scaffa, and the Rosary chapel, now the Blessed Sacrament chapel, with a twisted-column altar in red marble traditionally brought from Sant'Agostino in Mondovì after the Napoleonic suppressions.

• The baptismal font, dated 1490 and attributed to the Zabreri workshop of the

Val Maira, inscribed with the opening words of the Creed — a survivor of the medieval church, recorded as what remained of the restorations of 1470.

• The 1914 Vegezzi-Bossi organ, built with material from the earlier Serassi

instrument, with 47 stops over three manuals and pedals.

Context and history

The medieval church was restored in 1470 and again in 1560, when Pietro Dolce of Savigliano painted the facade; a 1583 pastoral visit counted fourteen altars whose patronage belonged to noble families and guilds, from winemakers to millers. As Cuneo grew into a fortress, the church absorbed the shocks of siege warfare, and a college of canons was instituted under Bishop Diego Della Chiesa in the 1640s. On Christmas night 1656 the vault collapsed. Reconstruction to grand designs by Giovenale Boetto of Fossano began with the first stone on 18 March 1657; services were being held by 1662 and the church was consecrated on 25 October 1665. Bombardment in the sieges of the following century caused further damage and enlargement, and the church weathered even the closure it suffered at the time of the French Revolution. Raised to cathedral rank when the diocese of Cuneo was created in 1817, it received its dome and its new facade in the decades that followed, and a crypt for the tombs of the bishops was laid out in 1968 beneath the chapel of San Giuseppe, where Cardinal Teodoro Valfrè di Bonzo is buried.